That is what I am doing here, on Shikasta b. And I want to understand Avi, whose Walker Index is 7.8, in between life and non-life. This is the first time he has been on active assignment in an alien world. He can learn. On an AI scale, he is a genius. In what ways will Shikasta b change him?
Annie:
This radical observation thing of Kranti’s—as she says, it’s nothing new— indigenous people have been practicing it for millennia. She was afraid Chirag would scoff—but I think she has a point. She thinks we should go even deeper. Let’s tell ourselves Shikasta b’s stories, she said, stories about this place. Maybe in assuming everything is alive, and giving each thing a certain agency, different degrees of aliveness will become apparent. What she’s saying, I think, is that if you are looking for a pattern and don’t know what it is, it makes sense to invent patterns of your own, semi-randomly. This Monte-Carlo-like shaking up of patterns and paradigms can throw up notions that you might not have reached through logic alone. This goes against conventional wisdom, which says—hey, we humans like patterns, so beware: the patterns we find are likely simply in our heads, as opposed to real patterns. The thing is, when it comes to “real”: what we recognize as patterns and connections are neither purely cultural (or anthropomorphic) nor purely “natural.” As Kranti says, “What is culture but a specific kind of contextualizing with the rest of one’s environment?”
Well, it could all be a waste of time. But we have that—time, I mean. What’s to lose?
Actually Chirag didn’t scoff when we suggested it. He was about to—I know the signs well: the way his left eyebrow starts going up, and the deep sigh—but his poetic side saw an opportunity. It was funny how his face changed, you could see that internal struggle. He has declared himself the official scribe, collecting our story ideas and rewriting them.
Once there was a planet too close to its star. They shared a vast and complex magnetic field, and their proximity made a beautiful world of extremes, separated by a circular boundary. In the boundary world it was neither too hot nor too cold, but it was always windy. Various species of hot beings lived on the dayside, and they wanted to know what it was like on the other side of the world, where the star’s heat and light did not fall. So the forces that shaped them—heat and pressure and magnetic forces—turned them into huge molten balls that rose from the lava seas and were flung at the sheer walls of the boundary, where they fell apart, crashing back down into the molten ocean. But the tiniest of them cooled and solidified into lava dust motes, and were able to ride the wind.
The Great Eastern Highlands, where Avi is exploring, is my favorite place on this planet. Imagine looking down into the magma pools of hell from such a height. I’ve never had vertigo—spent most of my childhood clambering up cliffs—but the vids from the edge of the great levee make me nervous and excited. I can hear the wind blowing at Avi’s back, a constant dull, muted roar—the cold surface current from the frozen nightside. Higher up, hot air from the substellar side swirls in the opposite direction.
We’ve gridded off the highland plateau on top of the levee. The dramatic temperature difference at the terminator makes for a fissured, tortured landscape. Lots of crevasses, passageways, mazes, all bathed by the dim, angry grazing light from the red dwarf star. Avi has made progress on his ground-based survey of Shiprock Canyon, which winds between sheer basalt walls on the plateau. His headlights reveal a maze of passageways, rocky arches, and bridges. At first I thought there was something wrong with his optics, because when he looked up, the stars didn’t look so clear at about 30 degrees around the zenith. Dust? The atmosphere is very thin, but I can imagine solidified lava bits from the molten rock fountains in the plains below, being swirled around by the wind.
Could there be dust devils on Shikasta b? Kranti’s message read. And as I sipped my coffee in the glowing sunrise of the high Arizona desert and looked at the newest image, I thought: Nilch ‘i. I remember my grandmother explaining to me when I was very little that the whorls on my finger pads and the little vortex of hair on my head were signs of the holy wind that animates us. There’s Nilch’i on another world, raising dust into a vortex, making this being, this Dusty Woman. Now that I know what to look for, I can see her form, faint but discernible against the backdrop of rock and sky, a dust devil composed of lava dust. She is whirling along the canyon like a live thing.
Dusty Woman danced through the narrow passageways of Shiprock Canyon, shaking her skirts and looking into the caves and hollows.
“Who is tugging at my skirts?”
But the wind took her voice away, and when it died she had to lay down to rest and wait until the wind picked her up again.
Kranti is making up a story about Saguaro, a creature that lives in the fissures and passageways of Shiprock Canyon. Chirag declares we are silly, but has joined the fun: his contribution is Balls of Fire (the semisolid glowing
